Issue 16 The Sea Winter 2004/05

Cabinetlandia: Update No. 2

Matthew Passmore

­­­For its Spring 2002 “Property” issue, Cabinet
beat hearty competition on eBay to buy, sight unseen, a 1/2 acre piece
of scrubland outside Deming, New Mexico. The resulting Cabinetlandia
was divided into sections with differing functions, some generou­s, some
wholly self-serving: Readerland, Nepotismia, Funderlandia,
Editorlandia, Internlandia, and so on. Three sections were left for
future projects to be done on the land. In July 2003­, we received a
letter from someone in San Francisco purporting to be a devoted reader
of Cabinet, one Matthew Passmore. His outlandish and
extravagant scheme for building the Cabinet National Library on one of
the project spaces seemed to be the stuff of a Werner Herzog short. We
published his letter and diagrams in issue 12. To our astonishment,
this past summer he made good on his perhaps hasty promise to go out to
New Mexico with some friends and build the library. Here is his report.

The drawings were finished, the supplies secured. We had successfully convinced the editors of Cabinet
that we were neither insane nor insincere, and did actually have a plan
to build the Cabinet National Library in Cabinetlandia, a desolate
tract on the outskirts of Deming, New Mexico.

I had
borrowed a minivan and filled it with all the tools one anticipates
needing to build a library out of a file cabinet in the middle of an
empty desert: assorted implements for digging, hundreds of pounds of
cement, many feet of chicken- and barbed-wire, one hundred
sand/earthbags, a shade structure and, of course, a sturdy,
three-drawer file cabinet manufactured under the encouraging brand name
“The Fortress.” It was Tuesday, June 30th 2004, and I was off to
Cabinetlandia.

After a bleary 1200-mile drive from San
Francisco to Deming, I rendezvoused with my fellow builders and
librarians: John Bela, Judson Holt, and Jed Olson. We are,
collectively, by trade and training, a rather gentile, white-collar
lot: artists, professionals, a doctor, a graduate student—in other
words, exactly the kind of crew that has so thoroughly fetishized the
customs of the working class that traveling to a barren desert in the
middle of nowhere to dig for long hours in the blazing July sun
actually qualifies as “vacation.”

So on the afternoon of
Friday, July 1st, with the crew assembled, the shade structure built,
and our library site situated what we hoped was a safe distance from
Luke Murphy’s buried uranium project, we began to dig. And much to our
pleasant surprise, at the end of that day, the cabinet was set securely
in place, and the earthbag wall was nearly complete. Before heading
back to our motel for the evening, we took a few moments to enjoy a
magnificent burnt-umber full moonrise over the desert.

The next day around midday, we completed the earthbag wall and began to cover it with our proprietary mix of cement and local soil. By early evening, the cement was dry and we had installed the collection of Cabinet magazines and the other essential elements of the library. With dusty pomp and circumstance, we officially opened the Cabinet National Library at sundown on Saturday, July 3rd, 2004. The evening achieved its ceremonious pinnacle with our homemade fireworks celebration (which, given the impressive array of explosives available in New Mexico around the Fourth of July, and seemingly relaxed regulations regarding their distribution, was a spectacularly satisfying display of bombs bursting in air).

For those readers would benefit from an orientation to the layout and contents of the library, here is what you will find there:

The top cabinet drawer contains the library card catalog, a guest
book and other “guest services” (a plush pillow to sit on while you
read and an umbrella to shade you). The middle drawer contains the
collection of the first thirteen issues of Cabinet, with each
magazine individually-wrapped in a plastic cover for protection from
the elements. The bottom drawer is the “snack bar” which, at the time
of our departure, contained a bottle of water, a pair of sturdy
workboots (men’s size 10) and two cans of steadily-warming beer.

The full landscaped area of the Cabinet National Library takes the form
of a circle with a radius of twelve feet—viewed from the south, the
cabinet is situated at the top, or “12 o’clock” position on the circle.
At each of the positions representing three, six and nine o’clock, we
have set a solar-powered lantern into the earth to help guide you
around the library grounds should you find yourself there after
sundown. Each lantern is also outfitted with a light sensor that
automatically shuts the light off during daylight hours (while the
batteries recharge) and turns the light on at night.

The
arced wall is approximately 15 feet long on either side of the cabinet.
As viewed from the backside, the library appears as a gently-sloping
mound rising from the desert floor, and is almost entirely camouflaged
from view.

The design of the Cabinet National Library was
inspired in various ways by the architectural visions of the Austrian
artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the writings of cultural geographer
John Brinckerhoff Jackson, and many large-scale desert art
installations we have witnessed over the years in Black Rock City,
Nevada.

If you decide to visit, may you enjoy your stay at
the Cabinet National Library (and don’t forget to sign the guest
book!). Please contact the editors of Cabinet prior to your
departure regarding any recent issues of the magazine that may need to
be added to the collection. If you go, we can recommend a truly
delicious home-style Mexican restaurant in Deming. However, if you find
yourself peckish while on-site, don’t hesitate to patronize the library
snack bar, and help yourself to a sip of water, or a can of hot beer.

­­

Matthew Passmore is an artist and filmmaker who lives in San Francisco. He is currently producing a number of film projects, including a feature film entitled Half of Nothing and a documentary about conservation biologists. He is also the Cabinet National Librarian.

Cabinet is published by Immaterial Incorporated, a non-profit organization supported by the Lambent Foundation, the Orphiflamme Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Danielson Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Katchadourian Family Foundation, and many generous individuals. All our events are free, the entire content of our many sold-out issues are on our site for free, and we offer our magazine and books at prices that are considerably below cost. Please consider supporting our work by making a tax-deductible donation by visiting here.